My Body Is A Big Fat Temple: An Ordinary Story of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood

By Alena Dillon

"Alena Dillon is one of my favorite writers and to read her journey through pregnancy is a great joy and heartbreak." - Amy SchumerMy Body Is A Big Fat Temple, a memoir of pregnancy and early motherhood, follows a writer as she debates having children, miscarries, faces morning sickness, uncertainty, physical impairments, labor, breastfeeding, the \u201cbaby blues,\u201d the heartache of not loving her son as she thinks she should, parenting through a plague, until finally (basically, mostly) blossoming into her new identity.The undertaking of creating life is airbrushed to preserve the ideal of motherhood, and exacerbated by a culture that dictates what women can do and how they should feel. We don\u2019t get the full story, so mothers with unromantic experiences feel like aberrations, and worse, alone. This is why the voices of women matter. The voices of mothers matter. Here\u2019s one to remind you of the important thing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Woodhall Press
• Release date: Nov 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781949116885

Alena Dillon

Alena Dillon is the author of Mercy House, which is in development as a CBS All Access television series. Her work has appeared in publications including LitHub, River Teeth, Slice Magazine, The Rumpus, and Bustle. She teaches creative writing and lives on the north shore of Boston with her husband, son, and dog.

Book preview

PREFACE

Dear Readers,

My mother is a map person—hard copy, because digital will not do. She drives with spiral-bound, laminated books charting the tristate area in the compartment of her car door. She stood below the Arc de Triomphe and ironed creases from one she tore from a travel guide. She’s the first person in a decade to walk into the City Hall of Beverly, Massachusetts, where I live, to request a paper map, compelling the municipal employee to sift through a filing cabinet until he found a document from a simpler time, yellowed with age. I imagine him blowing dust from its surface like a cinematic scholar who stumbled upon an antique book he didn’t realize was cursed, though the audience sure did.

Navigation is not my strength. When a group gathers around a phone to consider their route on Google Maps, I’m the one murmuring my consideration while also drifting farther back. But I can relate to the impulse to orient oneself, to clarify one’s my sense of direction. My maps, though, are books, and the experiences they share. Through them, I find my way. Without them, the world drops out of sight and, unsure how to proceed, or even how to feel, I freeze.

When embarking on unfamiliar terrain, I am as insistent as my mother. But instead of waving away my brother’s iPhone as we traverse the winding streets of the North End—she doesn’t need his app because she has a map—I scour libraries and bookstores. Those who have come before warn what to expect, and how many granola bars to pack. (The whole box. Always the whole box.) But more than that, I collect company so I don’t have to travel alone.

I hunted for comrades inside bindings the moment my husband and I considered starting a family. There were pregnancy guides and how-to parenting books, as well as investigations of prenatal topics I referenced as bibles (Expecting Better, Like a Mother) but not as many exploring the personal experience. There were a few—Great with Child, Waiting for Birdy, Operating Instructions, Homing Instincts, Maybe Baby, among others. I nested with these authors the way other women are said to alphabetize spice racks and sanitize ice cube trays to prepare their households. I was preparing my mind, cultivating gumption and know-how. Pregnancy is so variable, I wanted an army of women to swap perspectives, trials, fears, and joys to increase the odds of discovering myself in the pages. But despite being imperative to our species, pregnancy is not given much shelf space.

Nonfiction is a tricky genre, often requiring a strong platform, or at least a catchy hook. In other words, the author must be famous or have undergone an astonishing experience. There is certainly a place for celebrity memoir and harrowing tales. I’ve been known to double fist them. But standard experiences reflect the struggles and delights typical to the average Jo-sephine. They mirror the human heart. There is relief in discovering a shared humanity and realizing you are not alone. Or, as the poet Adrienne Rich phrased it in her book Of Woman Born, the willingness to share private and sometimes painful experience can enable women to create a collective description of the world which will truly be ours. Besides, even the most typical accounts of pregnancy and motherhood are extraordinary, and extraordinarily harrowing (spoiler alert).

The general public might not realize this because conversations about pregnancy are often airbrushed. We crop out the ugly parts, smudge over the distasteful, and enhance the romantic. In the rare instances when we speak honestly, it is in hushed tones so no one hears the secret: it kinda sucks. Why the discretion? Because lady-bit chitchat is impolite, or at least uninteresting, especially to those without that brand of bit. Also, we wouldn’t want the truth to intimidate women with still vacant wombs.

I was reminded of this when, legs parted on an exam table, I wailed, Why didn’t anybody warn me? and a medical practitioner answered, If you knew, you never would have gotten pregnant. She’s lucky I didn’t harness my pregnancy hormones and barrel gut to bulldoze her into a flap of white coat and regret.

Women don’t need to be tricked. Despite being silenced, harassed, and repressed; despite having to bear and raise children; despite being responsible for household duties; despite being invited into the workforce during World War II, offered universal childcare, and having all that ripped away; despite unpaid maternity leave, wage disparities, and corporate locker-room talk; despite being called hysterical or frigid, unreasonable or bossy, overly emotional or bitchy; despite having to coddle the male ego; despite cramps, Spanx, and underwire; despite all that’s worked against us—we run the world, or at least Beyoncé does. We deserve respect, knowledge, and transparency. Imagine if doctors didn’t divulge the reality of a vasectomy to a male patient, and when, cradling sore testicles, he demanded to know why he wasn’t informed beforehand, the doctor answered brightly, If I’d told you, you never would have had the procedure!

Besides, there are women with more than one child—lots of them. We live through pregnancy and for some reason agree to get pregnant again.

This is the type of book I was looking for, more than prenatal vitamins and ovulation trackers, and I figure there are other women out there who are hungry for information, honesty, and community the way yogurt commercials depict us as being hungry for 100-calorie dessert substitutes. I hope I can contribute to somebody’s network with this collection, and that one day I too will find an orgasm in the dairy section.

Each of these essays was written from inside the experience or, if that was impractical, directly following it. I wasn’t jotting notes in the midst of contractions, for example. I sought to capture my emotions like lightning bugs in glass jars before their charge faded, or was buffed or dulled by retrospect. I wrote while fearful, excited, awed, grieved, pissed off, and desperately needing to pee. I wrote while I was childless, expecting, as a new mother, and then as a slightly less new one. The voice of the narrator evolves along the way because, over this three-year maternal passage, including as our world was struck by plague, I evolved. (Sometimes, when appropriate, a future me returned to the text to intersperse moments of foreshadowing.)

Even as a female—a feminist female—it took being pregnant for me to revere women’s true resilience and mystical capabilities. I never appreciated how incredibly demanding the feat of creation is, the toll it takes on the body and mind, and how arduous it is to continue through the motions of life while forming one inside you. If I saw a pregnant woman on the subway, I didn’t comprehend she might have diabetes for the first time in her life. When I sat beside her in the waiting area of our OB-GYN, I didn’t consider the fortitude required when dreading bad news. When I noticed her in a diner booth, I didn’t acknowledge that bacon grease was an olfactory finger down her throat, yet she braved breakfast with her family anyway. I never appreciated her grit and valor. Her divine strength. Her supernatural gift. I saw her without seeing her.

Girl, I see you now, and not just because you are growing larger by the day. Because you are larger than life. You are, in fact, two lives.

This is for the pregnant, the famished, and the tired. It’s for you who have nibbled the same brand of cracker for the last three weeks because it’s just the right crispness and anything more or less will make you heave. It’s for you who want to call out of work but can’t afford to take another sick day, though you’ve never been so sick in your life. It’s for you with pain shooting into your crotch and tightness in back and belly muscles you didn’t know you had. It’s for you whose swollen ankles have amalgamated with your calves, and whose shoes may never fit again. It’s for you who have grown a two-pound organ, just for this occasion, that will be the second rider out the log chute. It’s for you who can’t soothe your newborn from the kind of open-mouthed howling that is so furious, so despaired, he stops breathing for a second, and so do you. It’s for you who are so overwhelmed by maternity you can’t remember who else you are. It’s for you who expected motherhood to be different, and worry it will never get better. It’s for you who want to be a mother—even if only sometimes—and for you who don’t.

I wrote this to process why I was afraid, stressed, frustrated, uncomfortable, hopeful, fractured, and amazed by pregnancy and preliminary parenthood, and why those feelings mattered to me and to our collective human experience. Call it therapy, academic inquiry, my craft, my living. Call it whatever you want—here it is, and I hope it honors the struggle that is necessary to the survival of our kind, but that is so often overlooked, underappreciated, shrugged off, or forgotten completely.

Sincerely,

Writer, Wife, Daughter, Sister, Friend, Mother, Me

PART I

Pre-Pregnancy

Puppy Love

PEOPLE SAY DOGS ARE THE GATEWAY DRUGS TO HAVING A BABY, BUT THAT’S not why we adopt our little doobie. We adopt her because I’m tired of strolling around town, realizing my husband isn’t beside me anymore, and spinning around to find he’s kneeling on the sidewalk two blocks back, nose to nose with a golden retriever. That guy is constantly chasing tail.

Penelope Chews—Penny for short—is lanky and floppy, with big paws, ears, and a tongue she’ll never grow into, a fourteen-pound lab-hound mix rescued with her siblings from a cardboard box on the Kentucky roadside. When Phil cradles her against his chest, she licks his chin like she already knows she’s his. Soon we’ll learn she’s saying, Sorry, pal, I have a belly full of parasites, so prepare for my ass to explode over your backyard for the next three months.

There are joys of dog ownership: When she learns a trick, or half a trick, since we have to modify our sweet dummy’s roll over to dead fish. When her tail pendulums in greeting. When we take her for a run, and she grabs the leash in her mouth to slow Phil down because I’m huffing twenty feet behind, patting my pockets for my inhaler. When her velvet ears shift back on her head like a sail adjusting to the wind, or perk up into silky quotation marks, framing thoughts of BONE! TREAT! SQUIRREL! When the light yellows her eyes into sleepy wolf slits. When she circles next to me and drops into a tired pile against my thigh. When she trots to her dog dish at five o’clock sharp. She tells time better than most millennials.

But at the risk of sounding like a garbage-person, there are also days when I don’t particularly like Penny.

On Thanksgiving, Penny frolics on my parents’ property, or what we call Penny’s country house, alongside my older brother’s infinitely energetic border collie and my parent’s more crotchety cockapoo. There are not many more idyllic sights than dogs unleashed.

We lose sight of her around a bush, and that is all it takes for her to surface the knob of an ancient ham bone my parents’ dog buried an unknown number of weeks, months, or years ago. She parades it before us, her head held high, trotting like a dressage horse. The bone fragment is the size of a tennis ball, gray, and clotted with dirt. It’s hard to tell what phase of decomposition has been interrupted, but I’d wager somewhere between mob-hit-washed-ashore and fossil.

Phil fishes a handful of kibble from his pocket and extends his hand. Penny, come. He sounds breezy, like he isn’t after her treasure; he wants to give her more food. He’s disturbingly convincing—the Russian spy of dog training.

Penny cocks her head. She’s not entirely persuaded, but that kibble sure does look tempting, sitting right there in Phil’s palm, free of charge. It’d be rude to turn down such a generous offer. She steps forward, her stare locked on the treats. Then she eyes Phil once more. Finally, she drops the ham bone, pounces on the dog food, and laps it up. I sigh. Crisis averted. Then she dives back to the bone. Before Phil has the chance to react, she grabs the decaying matter in her maw, unhinges her jaw, and swallows it whole.

Our six-month-old puppy-python returns to her sniffing, completely unaware that a fist of cartilage is barreling through her system. We stare, speechless, petrified it will, at any moment, rip her esophagus, lodge in her stomach, or obstruct her bowel. There’s nothing we can do but wait. I can’t engage with the rest of the family gathering. I’m too busy assessing Penny’s behavior. Is she lying on the couch because she’s tired from play, or is her lethargy a symptom? Are her eyes droopy? Yes, they are definitely droopy. Should we tear a veterinarian from her holiday just to have her tell us that Penny is presenting with hound eyes because she’s a hound?

At the sound of her retching, Phil and I fly out of bed, fight the crate open, and carry Penny outside in time for her next bout. There, in the stillness of two in the morning, we watch her be sick for five hours.

Penny, the heaving soloist, is accompanied by a symphony of rustling leaves, hooting owls, and screeching fisher-cats. There’s something contemplative about the dead of the night, when you’re standing in the dark, the sky pricked by stars and illuminated by a crescent moon, knowing most people within hundreds of miles are asleep, while your dog pukes in the dewy grass at your feet. It makes you wonder, Remember when holidays were easier? What are we doing? And dear Lord was that hot mud or dog barf? (It’s never hot mud. There is no hot mud.)

The next day, while we play UNO with our own customized family rules, including holding our breath and discarding Reverses from behind our backs, I’m too exhausted and preoccupied to even contribute to Mega Draw Four. What does the persisting vomit and diarrhea mean? Has Penny digested the bone yet? Will she be okay?

Was getting a dog a mistake?

Penny looms over us at six in the morning, her tiger-eye irises a set of black marbles in the dark, peering down at her drooling, snoring, slumberous owners like, So, uh, you guys are awake, right?

Phil stirs into consciousness, squints, and scratches her ear. Morning, you little scamp. Then he follows her into the living room where he spots a pile of gray cloth he mistakes for the mangle of his Irish flatcap. Oh man.

Phil doesn’t value many material goods. He’d be amenable to donating everything save for his electric guitar, wedding ring, utility knife, two pairs of boxers, and his Irish flatcap. Ireland is the landscape equivalent of his personality with its rolling, unpopulated countryside, gray skies, and misty glens. He cherishes that cap, and wears it everywhere but the shower. It would be a big deal if Penny destroyed it.

I sit up in bed, sensing my husband might finally lose his patience. Shit is about to go down.

But his tone lilts back up. False alarm. It’s a wool sock. But even if it was my hat, I’d already forgiven her.

He thought she had chewed up his favorite thing, and he’d forgiven her instantly.

Phil’s temperament should bolster my confidence in our ability to parent—after all, he’ll be half of my team. He has his flaws, like anybody else—he can go through an entire day forgetting to brush his teeth, his sense of style can be best described as wool, and he considers the original MacGyver to be good television—but his patience makes it easy to imagine him flourishing as a father. Our children might draw on the walls, scream in the car, mash Goldfish with balled-up fists, or cross their arms over their chest, and Phil will react with tolerance and strategy. He’ll extend the metaphorical kibble. He might pull a plaid shirt over their striped pants, torture them with cheesy shows about a resourceful haircut, or approach their heartache with the emotional deftness (oops, I meant deafness) he’s applied to my own breakdowns, saying, I can see you’re upset, when steam is straight-up whistling out of my ears, but he’ll also forgive them instantly.

What about me?

I tend to relationships like a horticulturist to her gardenia. (The following is strictly a metaphor for how I love people. I’m homicidal when it comes to actual plants. I’ve killed air plants, and they don’t even need soil. A gardenia would take one look at me and hari-kari itself into the earth.) I spray daily, position planters at big windows and rotate them by the hour. I ask questions and log the answers. I worry over their responses and my own. I follow up. I set dates. I cultivate connections until buds open and expand to fill my brain space.

But having Penny has surfaced an unsettling realization about my attachment style: my capacity to love and to love hard comes with a built-in delay. I’m not sure I love our dog yet, or not always, or at least not always well enough.

I’m preparing for company when Penny makes eye contact, squats, and looses a fire hose of piss whose longevity is only possible if Jesus has diversified his never-ending fish trick to include puppy bladders.

As I retrieve rug cleaner for my little miracle worker, the rice boils over on the stove. I lift the pot off the burner while Penny canters through her urine and tracks it into the living room. I shoo her and blot the mess with paper towels. Then I smell something charring. The Brussels sprouts are under the broiler. I leap into the kitchen, and Penny scurries back, tears up the soiled towels, and scatters them around the apartment.

I grab her by the scruff and scold through gritted teeth. No!

I hear a flash of